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Hindriks and Guala (2014) hope to provide a unified account of institutional theory that will combine the accounts of regulative rules, constitutive rules, and equilibria. I argue that only the constitutive rule approach has any possibility of success, and that the other two cannot even pose the right questions, much less answer them. Hindriks and Guala think constitutive rules can be reduced to regulative rules. I argue that their reduction is mistaken. The key to understanding social ontology is understanding status functions.

During the period roughly of the 1950s Oxford was generally regarded as the most important center of philosophy in the world, the one where the most interesting philosophical activity was going on. It was indeed so distinctive that the very name ‘Oxford Philosophy’ meant not just the philosophy that happened to be practiced in Oxford but a special kind of philosophy that gave a central importance to the study of language as the major topic of philosophical investigation. It is not an exaggeration to describe this period as a golden age of Oxford Philosophy. Quite by coincidence, my initial stay in Oxford from 1952–1959 happened to be during the high watermark of Oxford Philosophy.

This chapter is concerned with the ontology of a certain class of social entities and the role of language in the creation and maintenance of such entities. The social entities I have in mind are such objects as the $20 bill in my hand, The University of California, and the President of the United States. I also include such facts as that Barack Obama is President of the United States; that the piece of paper I hold in my hand is a $20 bill; and that I am a citizen of the United States. I call such facts “institutional facts,” and it will emerge that the facts are logically prior to the objects (because the object is only institutional if it is created by a certain linguistic operation that creates an institutional fact). Under the concept of social entity, I also mean to include such institutions as money, property, government, and marriage. I believe that where the social sciences are concerned, social ontology is prior to methodology and theory. It is prior in the sense that unless you have a clear conception of the nature of the phenomena you are investigating, you are unlikely to develop the right methodology and the right theoretical apparatus for conducting the investigation.

I have also a polemical aim for wishing to discuss social ontology and that is that I believe we have a long tradition, going back to the ancient Greeks, of misconstruing the role of language in the creation and constitution of social and political reality.

The writing of these essays was scattered over nearly two decades, and they were addressed to many different sorts of audiences. They exemplify my general preoccupations with three areas of philosophy: philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and what I call the philosophy of society. The first essay, which gives the title to the volume, was written for the American Philosophical Association as part of the centennial issue of the Association's proceedings. It is a revision of an article originally written for the Royal Society in a volume which discussed the future of various scientific and academic subjects in the twenty-first centuty. In a sense, the real introduction to this volume is Chapter 1, because in it I state my general conception of philosophy and its future and the articles which follow exemplify that general conception.

The second essay, “Social ontology: some basic principles,” originally appeared in the journal Anthropological Theory, in a special issue dedicated to my account of social ontology. Following this lead-off article, there were a series of other articles together with replies by me. My aim in this article, as in earlier and later work, is to give an account of the fundamental structure of social reality. I argue that the basic social mechanism, the glue that holds human society together, is what I call “status functions,” functions that can be performed only in virtue of collective acceptance by the community that the object or person that performs the function has a certain status, and with that status a function that can be performed in virtue of that collective acceptance and not in virtue of the physical structure of the object or person alone.

I have argued in a number of writings that the philosophical part (though not the neurobiological part) of the traditional mind-body problem has a fairly simple and obvious solution: all of our mental phenomena are caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the brain and are themselves realized in the brain as higher-level, or system, features. The form of causation is “bottom up,” whereby the behaviour of lower-level elements, presumably neurons and synapses, causes the higher-level or system features of consciousness and intentionality. (This form of causation, by the way, is common in nature; for example, the higher-level feature of solidity is causally explained by the behaviour of the lower-level elements, the molecules.) Because this view emphasizes the biological character of the mental, and because it treats mental phenomena as ordinary parts of nature, I have labelled it “biological naturalism.”

To many people biological naturalism looks a lot like property dualism. Because I believe property dualism is mistaken, I would like to try to clarify the differences between the two accounts and try to expose the weaknesses in property dualism. This short paper then has the two subjects expressed by the double meanings in its title: why my views are not the same as property dualism, and why I find property dualism unacceptable.

In spite of the fact that Turing's original article (Turing, 1950) is written in very clear and direct prose, there are a number of different ways to interpret the claims made in it. I am not, in this article, going to discuss what I think Turing's actual intentions were, but instead I will focus on three different ways of construing the results of the Turing Test that have been prominent in its application. I will assume for the sake of this article that the test itself is unambiguous. My discussion concerns the question: How do we interpret a positive result? On one natural construal, the test gives us a way of telling whether or not we have successfully simulated some human cognitive capacity, some human form of intelligent behavior that manifests thinking. If the machine can perform in such a way that an expert cannot distinguish the performance of the machine from the performance of a competent human, then the machine has successfully simulated the intelligent behavior of the human. Indeed, if our aim in Artificial Intelligence is to produce machines that can successfully simulate human intelligence then the Turing Test gives us a criterion for judging our own success and failure. I do not see how one could object to such a test. If the question is whether we have actually simulated, i.e., imitated, human behavior then, so construed, the Turing Test seems trivially right: If you can’t tell the difference between the original and the imitation, then the imitation is a successful imitation.

This article is about an old problem, but one that is seldom discussed in contemporary philosophy. Here is the problem: because a proposition, such as for example the proposition that Socrates is bald, consists of more than one element, how is it that the different elements of the proposition are connected together to form a unified whole? The problem has both a semantic and a syntactical version. In the semantic version it comes out as: How are the meaningful elements of the proposition connected to produce a single unified proposition? And in the syntactical version it comes out as: How are the words in the sentence organized to produce a meaningful sentence, as opposed, for example, to a meaningless jumble of words, or simply a list? I think contemporary discussions in both semantics and syntax just miss the problem and do not see how it presents a difficulty for their analyses. Thus, for example, on some versions of the direct reference theory and the corresponding doctrine of singular propositions, we are to think of the proposition that Socrates is bald as an ordered pair consisting of the man “Socrates” and the property “baldness.” But that cannot be right, because then the proposition would consist of two ordered elements. There is this man and this property, what do they have to do with each other? How does any unity emerge from that? The situation in syntax is just as bad, maybe worse.

Presidential Address delivered before the Sixty-fourth Annual Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Los Angeles, California, March 30, 1990.

INTRODUCTION, STRONG AI, WEAK AI AND COGNITIVISM

There are different ways to present a Presidential Address to the APA; the one I have chosen is simply to report on work that I am doing right now, on work in progress. I am going to present some of my further explorations into the computational model of the mind.

The basic idea of the computer model of the mind is that the mind is the program and the brain the hardware of a computational system. A slogan one often sees is “the mind is to the brain as the program is to the hardware.”

Let us begin our investigation of this claim by distinguishing three questions:

(1) Is the brain a digital computer?

(2) Is the mind a computer program?

(3) Can the operations of the brain be simulated on a digital computer?

I will be addressing 1 and not 2 or 3. I think 2 can be decisively answered in the negative. Since programs are defined purely formally or syntactically and since minds have an intrinsic mental content, it follows immediately that the program by itself cannot constitute the mind. The formal syntax of the program does not by itself guarantee the presence of mental contents. I showed this a decade ago in the Chinese Room Argument (Searle, 1980).

This article deals with an issue that much concerned Hans Kelsen, the “is”–“ought” distinction. It is a fragment of a much larger work I am preparing on the subject of rationality.

A number of binary distinctions are central to our philosophical tradition. One thinks of the distinctions between truth and falsity, good and evil, reality and illusion, freedom and determinism, mind and body, and fact and value. Sometimes the belief in these distinctions creates problems because it seems that the acceptance of a certain standard conception of one of the terms of the distinction rules out the possibility of anything satisfying the other term. I will illustrate this apparent difficulty with three examples: mind and body, freedom and determinism, and fact and value. The corresponding problems can be stated as follows: How can there be irreducible mental phenomena in a universe that consists entirely of non-mental material phenomena? How can there be events that are free human actions, and thus are events not caused by antecedent events, in a universe in which every event is caused by antecedent events? How can there be objective values binding on all rational agents in a world in which all objectivity is factual objectivity and in which values are not factual?

As formulated, none of these questions is answerable. That is, in each case the answer has to be: there can't be anything satisfying the conditions set by the phrasing of the question, because the phrasing of the question would make the hypothesis of the existence of any such phenomenon self-contradictory.

There are a large number of different problems concerning the self in psychology, neurobiology, philosophy, and other disciplines. I have the impression that many of the problems of the self studied in neurobiology concern various forms of pathology – defects in the integrity, coherence, or functioning of the self. I will have nothing to say about these pathologies because I know next to nothing about them. I will only mention those pathologies, such as the split-brain patients, that are directly relevant to the philosophical problems of the self.

In philosophy, the traditional problem of the self is the problem of personal identity. Indeed, in the standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Edwards, 1967) the entry “self” just says “see personal identity.” The problem of personal identity is the problem of stating the criteria by which we identify someone as the same person through changes. Thus, for example, the problem of personal identity arises in such a question as, What fact about me, here and now, makes me the same person as the person who bore my name and lived in my house twenty years ago? There are a number of criteria of personal identity and they do not always yield the same result. I will get to these shortly.

I want to use the occasion of this volume dedicated to the twenty-first anniversary of the Chinese Room Argument to reflect on some of the implications of this debate for cognitive science in general, and indeed, for the current state of our larger intellectual culture. I will not spend much time responding to the many detailed arguments that have been presented. I have already responded to more criticisms of the Chinese Room Argument than to all of the criticisms of all of the other controversial philosophical theses that I have advanced in my life. My reason for having so much confidence that the basic argument is sound is that in the past twenty-one years I have not seen anything to shake its fundamental thesis. The fundamental claim is that the purely formal or abstract or syntactical processes of the implemented computer program could not by themselves be sufficient to guarantee the presence of mental content or semantic content of the sort that is essential to human cognition. Of course a system might have semantic content for some other reason. It may be that implementing this program in this particular hardware is sufficient to cause consciousness and intentionality, but such a claim is no longer Strong Artificial Intelligence. It is at the very heart of the Strong AI thesis that the system that implements the program does not matter. Any hardware implementation will do, provided only that it is rich enough and stable enough to carry the program.

John R. Searle has made profoundly influential contributions to three areas of philosophy: philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of society. This volume gathers together in accessible form a selection of his essays in these areas. They range widely across social ontology, where Searle presents concise and informative statements of positions developed in more detail elsewhere; artificial intelligence and cognitive science, where Searle assesses the current state of the debate and develops his most recent thoughts; and philosophy of language, where Searle connects ideas from various strands of his work in order to develop original answers to fundamental questions. There are also explorations of the limitations of phenomenological inquiry, the mind-body problem, and the nature and future of philosophy. This rich collection from one of America's leading contemporary philosophers will be valuable for all who are interested in these central philosophical questions.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the problem of social ontology. The form that the exploration will take is a development of the argument that I presented in The Construction of Social Reality (Searle, 1995). I will summarize some of the results of that book and then develop the ideas further.

First of all, why is there a problem about social ontology at all? We are talking about the mode of existence of social objects such as the United States of America, the San Francisco Forty Niners football team, the University of California and the Squaw Valley Property Owners Association, as well as such large-scale institutions as money or private property. We are also talking about social facts, such as the fact that I am a citizen of the United States, that the piece of paper that I hold in my hand is a $20 bill, and that France is a member of the European Union. We are also talking about social processes and events, such as the presidential election campaign, the collapse of communism and the last World Series. We are talking, in short, about social facts, social objects, and social processes and events. To repeat the question, why is there a problem about these phenomena?

General ruminations on the state and future of philosophy often produce superficiality and intellectual self-indulgence. Furthermore, an arbitrary blip on the calendar, the beginning of a new century, would not seem sufficient, by itself, to override a general presumption against engaging in such ruminations. However, I am going to take the risk of saying some things about the current and future state of philosophy, even though I think it is a serious risk. A number of important overall changes in the subject have occurred in my lifetime and I want to discuss their significance and the possibilities they raise for the future of the subject.

PHILOSOPHY AND KNOWLEDGE

The central intellectual fact of the present era is that knowledge grows. It grows daily and cumulatively. We know more than our grandparents did; our children will know more than we do.

We now have a huge accumulation of knowledge which is certain, objective, and universal, in a sense of these words that I will shortly explain. This growth of knowledge is quietly producing a transformation of philosophy.

The modern era in philosophy, begun by Descartes, Bacon, and others in the seventeenth century, was based on a premise which has now become obsolete. The premise was that the very existence of knowledge was in question and that therefore the main task of the philosopher was to cope with the problem of skepticism.

I was asked to lecture at the Wittgenstein conference in Kirchberg in 2004 on the subject of phenomenology. This request surprised me somewhat because I am certainly not a scholar on the writings of phenomenological philosophers, nor have I done much work that I consider phenomenological in any strict sense. However, I was glad to accept the invitation because I have had some peculiar experiences with phenomenology. Also, it seemed worth discussing this issue at a Wittgenstein conference because the recent revival of interest in consciousness among analytic philosophers has lead to a renewed interest in phenomenological authors, since, of course, phenomenology is in large part concerned with consciousness.

I presented a lecture on the subject, the general thesis of which was that there is a type of idealism present in some of the leading phenomenologists, specifically later Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. It is idealism of a specific kind that I tried to define semantically – somewhat different from the traditional idealism of Berkeley, which is defined metaphysically, but close enough in family resemblance to the traditional conceptions of idealism to merit the term. The definition I used was this: A view is idealist in this semantic sense if it does not allow for irreducibly de re references to objects. All references to objects are interpreted as being within the scope of some phenomenological operator, such as Dasein or transcendental consciousness.